3.28.2017

Godard’s
Week End (1967) is a film of endings
and a film about endings—the end of a particularly vibrant and transformative
period of French cinema, which had begun in 1959; the end of the French
left-wing movements, which were to be squelched the following May; the end of
the first phase of Godard’s own career, which constituted an extraordinary run
of thirteen films made in almost half as many years.There is a sense of self-destructive abandon
about Week End, a nihilism and a
brutalitythat makes it feel like a
final film, in spite of the fact that Godard was only thirty-seven and would
continue a career that has extended into his eighties.Even at the time of its release Week End struck critics as the
culmination of something.“When it comes
to Godard, you can only follow and be destroyed,” wrote Pauline Kael.“Other filmmakers […] can’t walk behind
him.They’ve got to find other ways,
because he’s burned up the ground.”Godard
as trail-blazer as well as bridge-burner: not only did he burn up the ground
for others in Week End, he burned it
up for himself, having gone as far as he could with his experiments with conventional
narrative cinema.Going forward, he would
need to forge a new path.

Flames and apocalypse.

And
so it’s also a film that theorizes what comes after an ending. Week End
opens on a Saturday morning, as Roland and Corinne—along with masses of other
bourgeois couples and families—risk injury to themselves and each other in their
mad dash to get to the countryside (where Our Heroes plan to go about the
routine business of poisoning her father for his inheritance).By Sunday things have devolved into the stuff
of apocalyptic nightmare: the roadsides are littered with burning cars and dead
bodies, and the forests are teeming with robbers, terrorists, and
cannibals.The film does not end when
Monday rolls around, however. After the
weekend is over Godard imagines a future that is something like a return to the
past, as the survivors of this apocalypse re-enter a state of nature red in
tooth and claw, butchering and eating whatever animals (or people) they can
find.Hardly a happy ending—in fact, one
of Godard’s titles announces this as just the opposite.But it’s typical of Godard’s Marxism that the
film ends dialectically, with an ending that is also a beginning of some new
chapter in human history, strange and terrible though it may seem.

Life after the week end: the guerillas.

The
very last shot of Week End is a
close-up of the self-satisfied Corinne (Mireille Darc), perhaps the most
hideous of the film’s bourgeois monsters, casually eating the remains of her
husband.She’s only one of a series of
would-be femmes fatales in Godard’s 1960s films who regard the destruction of
men with a chilling neutrality.Breathless (1960) and Masculin Feminin (1966) similarly end
with close-ups of women left cold by the deaths of their paramours.Is this an anti-feminist streak that runs
throughout the early films?Is it Godard
shaking his fist at the amorality of an entire generation ruined by capitalism?Both of these interpretations seem out of
sync with the tone of Week End, which
is more misanthropic than misogynistic, more savage than moralistic, and
neither can be said to account for its black comedy.In Week
End in particular we’re made to wonder whether in the next twenty-four
hours Corinne the eater will soon become Corinne the eaten. All three films fade out on shots of the women
as victors in some sort of game.But
it’s a game whose rules are random and in which everyone loses in the end.What happens after that is left for us to
determine.